Feature

The Dharavi slum, Mumbai, India, during a monsoon rainstorm     [Gilles Saussier/Still Pictures]

Cities can provide healthy, safe and stimulating living environments without imposing unsustainable demands on natural resources, ecosystems and global cycles. 

It is often assumed that cities' environmental problems are made worse by the number of people and their high concentration. But this same concentration provides many potential opportunities. It greatly reduces the unit costs of providing each building with piped water, drains, all-weather roads, footpaths and electricity. This concentration also reduces unit costs for many services such as garbage collection, public transport, health care, schools and emergency services. 

The close proximity of so many water consumers within cities also gives greater scope for recycling or directly reusing waste waters. Cities concentrate populations in ways that usually reduce the demand for land relative to population, especially if urban sprawl is controlled. In regard to transport, cities have great potential for limiting the use of motor vehicles--which also means reducing the fossil fuel consumption, greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution that their use implies. This might sound contradictory, since most large cities have serious problems with congestion and motor-vehicle-generated air pollution. But cities ensure that many more trips can be made through walking or bicycling. They reduce travel distances--which is one of the reasons why cities developed. They make possible a much greater use of public transport and make a high-quality service economically feasible.

Industrial concentration in cities also lowers the cost of enforcing regulations on environmental and occupational health and pollution control. It reduces the cost of waste-handling facilities--including those that reduce waste levels or recover materials from waste streams for re-use or recycling. The concentration of people in cities can also make easier their full involvement in electing governments at local and city level and in taking an active part in decisions and actions within their own district or neighborhood.


Good Governance

A successful city is one that meets multiple goals. Such goals include: 

Achieving these different goals, while also responding to the needs of different groups, requires a political and administrative system through which the views and priorities of citizens can influence policies and actions within the district or neighborhood where they live, and at city level. Also needed are legal systems that safeguard citizens' civil and political rights, rights to basic services and the right not to face illegal and health-damaging pollution in their home, work or wider city. Moreover, government institutions that are accountable to public scrutiny are also required.

Rapid urban change need not produce serious environmental problems. Cities such as Curitiba and Porto Alegre in Brazil have been among the world's most rapidly growing cities in recent decades, and each is well known for its good-quality environment. Meanwhile, some of the most serious environmental problems are found in smaller cities or towns. Such problems become particularly serious where there is a rapid expansion in urban population with no consideration for the environmental implications or the political and institutional framework that is needed to ensure that environmental problems are addressed. 

Urban expansion without effective urban governance exposes large sections of the population to high levels of risk from natural and human-induced environmental hazards. In most cities in Africa, Asia and Latin America, 20-50 percent of the population lives in neighborhoods with very inadequate provision for supplying their needs for water or for ensuring the safe disposal of their solid and liquid wastes and storm run-off. They also live in poor-quality housing--for instance, whole households living in one or two rooms in cramped, overcrowded dwellings such as tenements, cheap boardinghouses or shelters built on illegally occupied or subdivided land. 


Health Risks

Many people live on land subject to periodic floods or at risk from landslides. In many cities and in most districts in which low-income households are concentrated, environment-related diseases and injuries are the leading cause of death and illness. In many poor city districts, infants are 40--50 times more likely to die before the age of one than in Europe or North America, and virtually all such deaths are environment-related. 

In most cities and many smaller urban centers, there is also serious environmental degradation in the surrounding areas and damage to natural resources--for instance, to soils, crops, forests, freshwater aquifers and surface water, and fisheries. These arise from demands for natural resources, changes to water flows, and air and water pollution and solid wastes generated by urban enterprises and consumers.

In most nations, both national and urban governments have failed in three essential environmental actions: to enforce appropriate legislation (including that related to environmental health, occupational health and pollution control); to ensure adequate provision for water supply and solid- and liquid-waste collection and treatment systems for all homes and neighborhoods; and to ensure adequate provision of health care which not only treats environment-related illnesses but which also implements preventive measures to limit their incidence and severity. City governments have also failed to implement land use policies that ensure sufficient land is available for housing developments for low-income groups.


New Environmental Agenda

A new environmental agenda is needed in cities that centers on enhancing the capacity of city governments, professional groups, NGOs and community organizations to identify and address their environmental problems. This is to address the environmental problems that underpin ill- health and premature death and to limit the damage arising from city-based demands and city-generated wastes on the local, regional and global environment. It is also to permit agreements to be reached about how each city can become a safer, more convivial place to live and work. 

The Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 recognized the key role that local governments should have in working with their populations to develop and implement sustainable development plans (or Local Agenda 21s). The last 10 years have seen many precedents of how such Local Agenda 21s can be effective in addressing local and global environmental problems--for instance, in cities such as Manizales in Colombia and Ilo in Peru. One key task for the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development is to press governments and international agencies to support Local Agenda 21s in all their cities and towns to ensure that urban governments are more effective and accountable to their citizens.

It is only through more effective local action within tens of thousands of urban centers that both local and global environmental problems will be addressed. But this needs supportive national policies. It also needs real action and commitment by the world's richest nations to relieve the economic stagnation and debt burdens faced in most low- and many middle-income nations. In this sense we have yet to establish the context for the stable, competent and democratic local governance so much needed if the opportunities that cities can provide for sustainable development are to be realized.

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